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Animoto

Tom suggested that I use Animoto to jazz up the slideshow of Fog Creek pictures. Here’s what came out of that:

Animoto is very simple: you give it a bunch of pictures and choose a soundtrack, and it gives you a video presentation. The part I liked best was how easy it was to get your pictures… you just point it at one of the five most popular online photo sharing services, and it shows you a list of your albums on that service. One click and all your pictures are imported:

The service is free for 30 second videos (about 15 pictures worth). For longer videos, it’s $3.00, which gets you a low res version. To upgrade to high res is another $5. There are all kinds of packages available if you plan to make a lot of videos. I was pretty impressed by the simplicity of the whole thing. It does take quite a while to render the video, though, so unless you have all day, you can’t make very many adjustments before you get tired of fooling around.